Perfectly Ordinary~ Batbrothers

Chapter 35

Damian POV

It was loud.

Constant voices swam in and out of his head, screams and whispers driving him to the edge of his sanity. It was loud and painful and then it wasn't.

Sometimes it got quiet. The type of stillness that felt like suffocating. It dragged you down and wrapped around you, like chains binding themselves around your ankles and pulling you into waves of water, the pressure got too much and it felt like his head would explode.

When he could register what was happening around him he couldn't bring himself to react. He was aware sometimes of the plates set before him, though he hardly touched them, only doing so when the pain in his stomach grew stronger than the pain in his mind. Even then it was only a few bites.

He hardly ever slept though he never felt awake.

A part of him said that it was just another body, just another kill, but he couldn't bring himself to think like that. When the blood had spilled over his mother red lips, staining them crimson forever, he lost control.

He liked to think of it as a representation in his mind. A large see through glass jar which was only opened when something new needed to be sealed inside. Every death and bad, painful memory was locked away underneath the surface and he had control over it. Oh sure sometimes the nightmares would escape into vivid hallucinations but he thought that maybe that could learn to be controlled. Every emotion had been shoved away for so long that he never got the chance to learn how to deal with them.

When Talia died the lid of that jar had not blown off, no, the glass had shattered into millions of pieces and buried themselves deep into his skin, the contents spilling over his insides like a disease.

He vaguely heard it when Dick got onto his knees and begged for him to just say something, please Damian talk to me. He registered it when Tim swallowed down his hundredth cup of coffee while perched on the chair of Damian's desk. He could sometimes temporarily escape the cages of his mind to listen to Mister Carlisle's stories.

But most of the time he was drowning.

Sometimes it was summer crawling down his throat and setting fire to his veins, guilt coming on in waves of heat crashing into him and biting at his mind and conscious, it restricted his breathing and felt like the blood on his hands had sucked into him and was boiling him from the inside out.
Other times it was winter crawling up and down his spine, his neck, his legs. It stopped him from moving because the ice was cracking and it would break if he just twitched a muscle.

He wanted to scream and cry and break.

He wanted to lock it up and pretend like he was still strong.

He couldn't understand why everyone was being so normal. Didn't they know? He murdered someone's son and brother and netphew, he murdered someones daughter and sister and niece. He murdered mothers and father and children and he didn't think twice about it. Why were they acting like it was okay?

He wasn't sure how much time had passed since his return, but he thought that it could've been weeks.

He had been about to shower since he had just been sitting down and staring out the window for a few days at the bodies that, in his mind, littered the front lawn. He had been looking in the mirror and it took him a minute to realize that he was staring at his reflection.

His eyes were sunken and hollow, dark hair grown out and scraping his ears. He looked pale and his face looked thinner than he last remembered it being.

He slowly pulled his shirt off his body, muscles screaming with effort, and much to his horror when he came face to face with his reflection again, she was standing behind him. Her smile was razor sharp and crimson red, her eyes matching the now dull green of his own.